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Charter freedoms and human rights are ignored when gathering information in random stops on the street, say rights advocates and lawyers.

By Patty Winsa and Jim RankinStaff Reporters

Wed., Jan. 23, 2013

Toronto police have stopped millions of people and entered their personal information into a massive database, but a plan to issue receipts for those interactions was put on hold once again Wednesday after the Toronto Police Services Board voted instead to get advice from the city’s lawyer on whether the entire practice is legal.

The move came after human rights advocates, as well as lawyers from the Law Union of Ontario, called for an end to both the stops and the documentation by police, often called carding because of the small white Field Information Report card — or FIR 208 — that police once used to record the personal information. The information now goes into a computer database.

“This board has a clear obligation to deal with the issue of whether the entire practice of carding, including form 208 and the questions asked, contravenes the Charter and the Human Rights Code,” said Howard Morton of the Law Union of Ontario.

Paul Copeland, a co-founder of the law union, told the board: “My own view is that it’s illegal and violates people’s rights. And I would like the board eventually to say you can’t do stops and collect this information. This is not in line with the Charter,” he said. “And I want young people to know that they can say, ‘No, I don’t want to talk to you.’”

Carding has been an issue for the board since Known to Police, a Toronto Star investigation that found Toronto police stop and document black people at disproportionately high rates. While blacks make up 8.3 per cent of Toronto’s population, they accounted for 25 per cent of the cards filled out between 2008 and mid-2011.

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Police Chief Bill Blair has repeatedly said racial profiling is abhorrent and won’t be tolerated. But Blair defends carding as an invaluable investigative tool in areas with a lot of violent crime.

Former mayor John Sewell, who heads the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition, and members of the Canadian African Legal Clinic as well as the Canadian Civil Liberties Association have appeared before the board numerous times, imploring members to call a halt to practice or at least get officers to issue a record of the interaction to make them more accountable.

“It’s hard to believe most of us would countenance police asking us in a random stop whether our parents were divorced, for their surnames and whether we were attending school,” Sewell told the board Wednesday. The “information is of a very personal nature.”

But Deputy Police Chief Mark Saunders said the notion that the stops are random is incorrect, and that carding is based on areas with high levels of crime. “Random is not a terminology that we use,” he said. The deputy chief said carding has a tremendous impact on investigations.

But former budget chief Mike Del Grande, in his first appearance on the board, asked why, if that was so, that aren’t statistics to back up the claim. If 1.2 million cards are gathered, he asked, “What benefit, if any, does the process bring?”

Saunders, who is leading the force’s own investigation into carding, told the board an initial analysis of 1.2 million records over a three-year period showed that 47 per cent of people stopped were white, 23 per cent black and 15 per cent brown-skinned. Some 90 per cent had been stopped only once.

“It’s not an issue of continuously stopping people over and over again,” Saunders said. Once the data is analyzed, Saunders said, police will take that information out to focus groups and broader community consultation.

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